Cancer Drug Fund didn’t deliver value ‘to patients or society’

A fund that was established in England to increase access to cancer medicines has been found to have provided little clinical benefit.

The Cancer Drugs Fund, which ran from 2010 to 2016, cost more than £1 billion, and gave people access to expensive new cancer drugs not routinely available on the NHS.

Now researchers have analysed the impact of the fund by examining 29 of the drugs made available by it in January 2015. They found that only 18 of these drugs were supported by research showing they would improve how long a person lived.

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The study found an average increase in survival of just over 3 months, but across the drugs this ranged from around 1 month to more than 15 months.

When quality of life and toxic side-effects caused by the drugs were taken into account, the study found that the majority of the drugs failed to show any evidence of meaningful clinical benefit.

“The majority of cancer medicines funded through the CDF were found wanting with respect to what patients, clinicians, and the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence would count as clinically meaning benefit,” says Ajay Aggarwal, an oncologist at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, who led the study.

Innovative treatments

“We conclude the Cancer Drugs Fund has not delivered meaningful value to patients or society,” the team wrote in their study. They added that there was no measurable evidence that funding should be ring-fenced for cancer drugs, to the exclusion of other cancer treatments like surgery or radiotherapy, or medicines for other diseases.

But Paul Catchpole, of the Association of the British Pharmaceutical Industry, which represents UK drug companies, says the majority of the medicines that were funded by the CDF are now going on to be approved by Nice for routine use on the NHS, and that the clinical benefit of these drugs has been reaffirmed.

The CDF has now been replaced by a fund more closely managed by Nice. “The old CDF was always just a sticking plaster and we welcomed its overhaul because it was too expensive, unsustainable, and provided little certainty to patients and their doctors,” says Paul Workman, at the Institute of Cancer Research.

Workman says the new system is more evidence-based, and should address some of the issues highlighted in this study. However, he says it’s essential that this system gives fast access to innovative cancer drugs.